Yes, I Write Professionally

Every day I don’t spend Writing or developing a project feels like a waste.

Its been this way for a few years. Time that I have spent, for instance, writing out over 350 pages filling 3 notebooks, writing the better part of 2 plays a pilot and half of a novel. I used to write every single day, Now I’m lucky if I have time to sit and work on my days off.

Its been a theme of my last few months. A constant droning voice gnawing away at what I assume is my mind, telling me in some eldritch tongue that I need to write more to service the elder-gods, or some other nonsense.

Even so, I don’t like to refer to myself as a “Writer”.

The term has too much baggage. Whenever I say, “I Write”, there is an immediate look on someones face. There are always questions.

“Have you written anything I know?”

That would be code for, “Are you published?”. The answer is: Not Yet.

“What do you write?”

A question thats kind of like asking someone what neighborhood they live in when you don’t know the city. I appreciate the interest and will give you the logline, but most of the time its met with the blank look that reminds me how much of a rhetorical question “What I write” usually is.

Words. I write Words.

“But what do you do for a living?”

Starve, mostly. Or, more realistically, I have a job and write when I can.

“Oh that’s lovely”

You can often hear the condescension drip like… Well… Condensation. I hope the inadequacy of that simile illustrates how few fucks I give.

But always it comes down to one essential question that people seem to have: “Do you make a living writing?”

No. I don’t.

Not many people do.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t write professionally. 

I don’t know if I have enough experience or gravitas to speak eloquently on this matter. After all, it was only 3 years ago that I even began pursuing writing as a career. But it seems if I haven’t gotten paid for writing, there is an expectation that I should say that I am an “Aspiring Writer”.

But I’m not aspiring to anything, I’m working. Its my second and my third job. I am sure that a lot of other “Aspiring Writers” feel exactly the same way.

Why would we do such a disservice to the work we are doing by referring to our writing as anything other than professional?